The One Yuan Campaign will tour the country for three months, performing 20 shows, where they will sell their albums for one yuan each.

The purpose is nothing less than saving the Chinese rock music business.

“A pop singer could make about 10,000 yuan ($1,580) for three songs in one night at a commercial show,” Yin Fang, the leader of the band Candy Doll who came up with the campaign, told China Daily. “But when it comes to selling CDs the singer gets very little money from copyrights. So you can imagine how bad the situation is for rock musicians.”

The tour is basically a means of bringing rock music into the commercial music fold, a place they are usually shut out of.

By charging the relatively low price of one yuan for records, the participating bands are not going to make money but are promoting the idea of people paying money to proper vendors for music they like.

The campaign plans to make the rounds of the summer music festivals.